New York|Letitia James, New York Public Advocate, Sues Education Dept. Over Schools’ Disability Services

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Letitia James, New York Public Advocate, Sues Education Dept. Over Schools’ Disability Services

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Letitia James, the New York City public advocate, in March. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, Ms. James said that a $130 million computer system meant to track services for students with disabilities was a failure.CreditCreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

Public Advocate Letitia James has sued the New York City Education Department, saying a $130 million computer system meant to track services for students with disabilities was a failure.

Because of the system’s shortcomings, the lawsuit said, children have been deprived of necessary assistance and the city has lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements.

There are more than 200,000 students in the city’s public schools with individualized education plans, known as I.E.P.s, which entitle them to special education services like speech therapy. The computer system, called the Special Education Student Information System, was developed in 2009 as a way to keep track of them, a replacement for a system that relied on paper.

The system was intended to track the services students were eligible to receive and to create records that could be used to get the city reimbursed. But Ms. James, a Democrat, said it had been plagued with difficulties since its inception.

According to papers filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Monday, the system is prone to malfunctions, including deleting saved student data. It also “does not appear to be capable of producing citywide data about I.E.P.s, including how many children are receiving” special education services.

Ms. James said, “The failure of the program is resulting in a lack of services for our most vulnerable children, and we’re basically cheating taxpayers of rightful funding from the state and federal government.”

“Everyone is telling me they’re aware of it and correcting it,” she said of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña. “But I’ve heard that before.”

In an email on Tuesday, Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the New York City Law Department, said, “We’ll review the suit once we are served.”

A spokesman for the Education Department pointed to several steps the agency had taken to help its special education students, including hiring more than 300 new occupational therapists and opening more programs tailored to children with autism.

But the city is facing other criticism over the way it handles the needs of students with disabilities.

In December, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, sent a letter to the Education Department saying that 83 percent of the city’s elementary schools were not “fully accessible” to people with disabilities, a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Last month, the city rejected Mr. Bharara’s finding, saying the letter “inaccurately characterizes the number and geographic distribution of accessible schools.” When taken as a whole, the city argued, its elementary schools “provide full program accessibility for all elementary students.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Education Dept. Is Sued Over Its Disability Services. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe